When Fact-Checks Backfire | Hacker News Reader

When Fact-Checks Backfire

theatlantic.com

17 pointspaulpauper24 comments

Humanity needs ground truths or we just descend into anomie.

Yeah, but that's not why people are upset about factchecks. They're upset about it being used in nitpicky ways in an attempt to score political points, eg. https://x.com/NBCNews/status/785299709342654465

Or when they "fact check" a statement with 4 paragraphs of text that amount to "it's true but inconvenient so we'll say it's been 'fact checked' to undermine the statement."

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/09/10/us/debate-trump-harr...

Some people are upset about that.

Some people are upset that their politically convenient lies are being challenged.

And ironically more chaos/anomie, we can't even trust/agree on what we're upset about.

This is also why I wish political slogans were better worded. Yes it's catchy but others dismiss it at face value when there is perhaps some truth to whatever nuanced grievance they're trying to express. Further polarising debate.

I think "fact checking" has lost its legitimacy in the eyes of many people — and journalism in general. You can't convince people that something is objective when it has an obvious bias.

Think of The Washinton Post's absurd "fact check" of Bernie Sanders. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/bernie-s...

Granted, we know that some beliefs are incredibly resistant to contradicting evidence, and can even result in people doubling-down (e.g., anti-vax). (Ironically, I don't have a citation for this at hand.)

The fact that someone can gain credibility by announcing that they are a truth teller explains way too much about the reliability of garden variety human empiricism.

“Fact-checker” is just a sad last-ditch attempt to salvage this “Arbiter of Truth” status from the smoldering remains of the once-respected “journalist” profession.

I agree. But at the same time wonder if there are just some folks who are contrary and use facts when it suits them and ignore them when not.

I know in one case, the person is simply always right. So in this case, it's a personality thing more than a fact thing.

It's crazy to me how much the US internet despises fact-checking when we just watched a debate where a candidate unabashedly lied about easily verifiable information for an hour and would have gotten away with it if not for the moderators stepping in to call out the bullshit. The value fact-chekers provide is context, not the rating-- where did they get this information, does their statement follow from it, and is the source reputable / corroborated by others.

The thing that keeps fact-checkers in check is academic discourse. If someone is doing a poor job then write yourself a Re: and publish it. The "psyop" is convincing people that truth doesn't exist and you should just immediately discount anyone who presents an argument that disagrees with your pre-existing biases. The back-and-forth is the point.

Anyone can be a fact-cheker, it uses the same skills you all learned in highschool to write papers. I can understand not liking the label "fact-checker" because it implies some unassailable source of truth, and I agree I would have called them critics or reviewers, but I don't get to choose the language that catches on.

My favorite part was when they immediately fact-checked the statement that US soldiers are not currently deployed in any active combat zones, which not only demonstrated the even-handedness of their fact-checking rigor but also proved that truth—not partisan media bias or running cover for the current regime—is and should always be the ultimate goal of any media fact-checking initiative.

Oh wait that didn't happen lol

NPR called her out for this and gave it "mostly false" despite it being true but misleading and required a confirmation from the DoD. What did you want to happen? "Just a moment Vice President Harris, I need to get on the phone with Kirby to confirm this before we continue."

https://www.wusf.org/politics-issues/2024-09-13/politifact-f...

Who cares about NPR? We were talking about ABC's "live fact-checking".

Every American (and most of the rest of the world, too) who doesn't live under a rock (especially "journalists") knows that the US has had active duty military in combat zones since at least 2003—you don't need to call up the Department of Defense to fact-check that information.

Which is what NPR is saying, that Harris was being misleading by relying on technical terms that don't match people's real-life understanding of the words. Would you have been confident enough to call that out when even NPR after the fact can't get a definitive answer to whether her literal words were correct? They only checked like three things the whole debate that were unambiguously false.

Why have you outsourced your common sense to NPR?

How much you want to bet that if the omnibus spending bill isn't passed, good old state media NPR says something about our fighting men going unpaid.

Schrodinger's war.

The real problem was they only "fact checked" one person when both told lies. You should really step out of your echo chamber.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-very-fine-people/

And they only fact-checked some of the lies of that one person, the blatantly obvious ones. You're complaining about fact-checking being biased and then citing fact-checking doing good work. Go read any analysis of the debate, the moderators let almost all the bullshit go unchecked. I think it says something different that with what was very light-touch moderation with the high-striker set higher than most viewers would have wanted Trump's bullshit rung the bell more than once.

The real, real problem is that there's a candidate for President who can be predicted in advance to make the unfounded claim that immigrants are eating pet cats with such confidence that a response can be ready.

Trump was just subject to a second assassination attempt. How do you figure Kamala's lie, which she and the moderators knew was a lie, which was intended specifically to demonize a man who had already been subject to one assassination attempt, was somehow a "less real" problem than a lie about a Haitian eating a cat?

Seems like no one so far actually read the article (podcast transcript).[†]

Bottom line: the "backfire effect" doesn't replicate. They managed to cause a backfire effect by phrasing their "fact checks" in a deliberately vitriolic way. This should surprise nobody, and to me, only confirms that the general "backfire effect" isn't real.

[†] Including me. I used Kagi Universal Summarizer and then spot-checked it. https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html?target_language=&summ... or pastebin[.]com/z0qx45tG

"fact checking" is a psyop

first of all, the "fact checker" simply claims the mantle of objectivity with no supporting evidence. why is some nameless writer at Snopes the arbiter of truth? because they say so?

and all "fact checks" merely knock down a strawman to reinforce some hand-wavey political point. here is every fact check:

CLAIM: Democrats are great

CHECK: true!

The actual power of objectivity isn't just from claiming it though. If you have a blatant history of obviously biased checks it'll lose power quickly as stories about your checks get tagged with your history. They're still useful within closed media ecosystems but the people in those are already looking for confirmation from anyone 'objective' or not.

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